Back in August last year, I wrote the post ‘More Delusions About Religion’. It was my response to a Letter to the Editor that a Chris McColl had sent to his local newspaper in Australia. I saw the letter because George Takei posted it on his Facebook page. Yesterday, Chris himself came across my post and was good enough to respond to my comments. (I’m going to call Chris McColl...
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A new time lapse film by Martin Heck of Timestorm Films came out this week. ‘New Zealand Ascending’ It took sixteen weeks of production time and 185,000 photos to make a film of less than seven minutes. The result, as always is beautiful. New’s Zealand’s Māori name is Aotearoa, which means “Land of the Long White Cloud”. That’s particularly appropriate for this...
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Donald Trump spent his election campaign making statements like this one from a 7 December 2015 press release. Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on. There were even calls for a Muslim registry. Those statements and others like them morphed into the recent executive...
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Valentine’s Day was yesterday in New Zealand, and I was going to post these then, but I was having a Bad Day so it didn’t get done. I was having a Bad Day before I even remembered it was Valentine’s Day, but that made it worse of course. I’m quite sure many more people have a Bad Day on 14 February than a good one. I’m equally sure that for many Valentine’s Day is the...
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The Australian government set up the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in 2013. There were ongoing revelations in the media of institutions moving alleged abusers moving from school to school rather than reporting them to the police. Further, some people, usually senior church, government, and law enforcement figures, allegedly hadn’t tried to stop further abuse...
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